February 7, 2010

Finding Old Caches, Part II

In the last post, I talked about my latest searches for some of the oldest caches in my home county, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this post, I'll explain how to generate a pocket query that will give you a list of the oldest caches in your home region.

In geocaching.com, go to the Build Pocket Queries page (you have to have a geocaching.com account), and then select "Create a new query". You can name it whatever you like (I chose "old"). You can leave most of the selection options blank, but here is a list of the key options to modify:

1, Show me 500 caches of (500 is the maximum you can choose for any one pocket query)
2. From Origin My Home Coordinates
3. Within a Radius of 500 mi (500 miles is the maximum)
4. Placed between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2000:

That last selection is the key. Since geocaching didn't officially begin until the year 2000, there weren't a whole lot of caches being placed that year, simply because there weren't a whole lot of geocachers back then. So you are not likely to generate an extensive list of caches placed during that year within 500 miles of your home base. In fact, there may not be any that meet that criteria, in which case you'll want to extend the Dec. 31, 2000 date to a date further in time until you return some actual results. For me, there are only 19 caches that meet that criteria:

Your PQ list will be sorted by distance from your home coordinates, so you'll have to look at each date to figure out which one was actually the first ever placed in your region. Once you know which caches are the oldest in your area, you'll definitely want to add these to your "to do" list just to see what some of the original cache hides were like.